To Mourn a Child: Jewish Responses to Neonatal and Childhood Death Edited by Jeffrey Saks and Joel Wolowelsky and Kaddish: Women’s Voices Edited by Michal Smart and Barbara Ashkenas. Review by Erica Brown.
2015
Embracing Change: Forgotten Traditions Within Sephardic Judaism
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Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East by Zvi Zohar. Review by Tzvi Marx.
2015
Demitasse
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You evaded the fire-storm, reaching the shore / Of the New World long before, so nothing / To speak of has shaken you more than the rage / In my father’s voice or my brother’s infant fist / Shattering a pane of the china closet, leaving you / Unharmed (the shards swept away, the glass / Replaced in a day).
Articles
A Godless Jewish Humanist
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Fromm’s quest was to free the cultivation of spirituality and ethics from their theistic, authoritative moorings in the Hebrew Bible and forge them—with elements of Hasidic mystical relatedness and themes from Marxism, Christianity, and Buddhism—into a new ethical humanism.
Activism
Media Justice Is Social Justice: Why the Comcast-Time Warner Merger Matters
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Why does net neutrality matter? Because we’re treating a lifeline to the American economy and a lifeline for communities that need to organize as if it was just about profit, rather than as the essential human right that it is.
Music
Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Protected: Download Radical Amazement – NSP Members Only
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Welcome! Thank you for being a member of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. Together we are helping to transform our world into one where love, generosity, and environmental sanity are our Bottom Line. As a member of the NSP, you have exclusive access to this specially curated album below. We hope that you’ll enjoy it as much as we do. Radical Amazement is a collection of songs by a diverse array of artists, all who shares the NSP’s message.
Activism
Honor Block
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True to its reputation, the prison was violent. And ugly. I witnessed cuttings and stabbings in the yard. They erupted without warning, like lightning. At night in my cell, I heard the screams of men being beaten by the guards.
Culture
Chana Bloch’s poem Potato Eaters
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Chana Bloch. Photo by Peg Skorpinski
Potato Eaters
Chana Bloch
My grandmother never did learn to write. “Making love” was not in her lexicon;
I wonder if she ever took off her clothes
when her husband performed his conjugal duties. She said God was watching,
reciting Psalms was dependable medicine,
a woman in pants an abomination. In their hut on the Dniester
six children scraped the daily potatoes from a single plate;
each one held a bare spoon. Five years from the shtetl her daughters
disguise themselves
in lisle stockings and flapper dresses.
2014
Work Your Quirk: The Power of the Disability Art Community
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When I first joined Interact Theater Company, I had recently been in a motorcycle accident and lost the use of my right arm. The question was posed, “If there was a pill to take away your disability, would you take it?” I was surprised to find that I was the only one in the circle who said yes. I looked at my fellow performers and wondered if I would ever be able to accept my new self.
2014
Holy Access
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I am lying comfortably on the table in my acupuncturist’s office. Mellow music plays in the background while my acupuncturist soothingly talks me through my treatment. As we chat casually about the different approaches between Eastern and Western medicine, she suddenly stabs me with a metaphorical needle, puncturing our trust: in the same calm tone she has been using all morning, she tells me that, within Chinese religions, physical illness and disability are often understood as “a result of mistakes made in a previous life—a disability is an indication of a lesson that one’s spirit needs to learn.” Inaccurately conflating the rich diversity of Chinese philosophical and religious systems of thought under the single blanket of “Chinese religions,” my white acupuncturist has simultaneously disseminated incorrect information and made me feel inferior and unmeritorious. Her suggestion that I am to blame for my disability jolts me back to a similar experience from the previous year, when I was traveling with my guide dog, Papaya, and needing to catch a connecting flight. An airline employee assisted me with the transfer while discussing the unending bounties of Jesus’s love.
2014
Diverse Insights into Jewish-Muslim Relations
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A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations
Edited by Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora
Princeton University Press, 2014
This collection of scholarly yet accessible articles by dozens of Jewish and Muslim experts is the definitive source for understanding a complex relationship between Muslims and Jews from the seventh century to the present day. Its 1,146 pages cover pressing political issues like whether Jews are demeaned in Islam and whether Jews faced real (as opposed to just remembered) anti-Semitism in Islamic societies. It also explores the ways in which contemporary Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are both products and causes of the political struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. Yet the richness of this fantastic and exciting book lies also in its descriptions of how Jews and Muslims have learned from each other in the arenas of philosophy, science, art, literature, and mysticism.
2014
The Crisis of Disability Is Violence: Ableism, Torture, and Murder
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Andre McCollins was eighteen years old in 2002 when he was a student at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Massachusetts. Like many of the students at the center, a residential institution for people with disabilities, Andre is autistic and has other mental disabilities. One day in October 2002, a staff member told McCollins to take off his jacket. He said no. That was direct defiance and disobedience to directions from staff.
2014
A Promised Land
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How to keep the promise of a promised land? Not only a name, a place, a flag. It’s an end to wandering in the wilderness,
the wilderness inside ourselves. It’s singing sweeter than scorpions. It’s touching everywhere softer than snakes.
2014
On Violence, Joy, and Justice: The Poetry of C.K. Williams
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All at Once
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014
by C.K. Williams
Writers Writing Dying
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012
by C.K. Williams
On Whitman
Princeton University Press, 2010
by C.K. Williams
In his preface to On Whitman, C. K. Williams says only Shakespeare compares with Walt Whitman in providing him an “inexhaustible” source of inspiration. Yet “with both, but particularly with Whitman, I need a respite, surcease, so as not to be overwhelmed, obliterated. This is more raw than Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence,’ more primitive.”
On the dust jacket for the Whitman monograph, Michael Robertson calls Williams “one of our most Whitmanesque poets.” The idea of Williams as a Whitman for our time is not wrong, but it is incomplete and potentially misleading. Yes, Williams arrived in his third collection of poems at a long, sinuous free-verse line that reminds one, at first glance, of Whitman. Yes, one finds in Williams great sympathy for the suffering of others and a willingness to open poetry to a wide range of human experience, including parts of it many of us would rather not see.
2014
Five Books on Neoliberalism, Nonviolence, and Society
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by Jay and Ramaswamy, Scruton, Giroux, Sassen, and Nagler